The Post-Birthday World

  “But I don’t want it to be too simple,” she objected.

  “It’s a children’s book!”

  “The biggest mistake children’s book authors make is writing down to their audience. Kids are short. That doesn’t mean they’re stupid.”

  “But that ending fucks everything up!”

  “Fucked-up sounds realistic to me.”

  “Look, up to that penultimate point, you’re saying basically, stick by old ties—and we’ll leave aside for a sec the fact that you can have more than one friend.”

  “You can only have one best friend, as any schoolchild knows. A huge proportion of the drama in childhood is all about who fills that slot, and who gets booted out.”

  “But as is, the moral of this story is that the protagonist was a sap, and should have run off with the new kid when he had the chance. Like, screw old ties, it’s a Darwinian world out there, every man for himself.”

  “That’s one way of reading it,” she said coolly. “The other slant you could put on it is that Ivan feels terrible in both instances, and your author never tells you in which he feels worse. In fact, the suggestion is—since the wording is identical—that between betraying and being betrayed, the anguish may be a toss-up.”

  “There is no way that any kid is going to get that,” Lawrence insisted.

  “There is no way that any kid is not going to get that,” Irina countered.

  Lawrence took umbrage that she resisted his editorial advice, but Irina stuck to her guns on the ending, and then got down to the illustrations. Drawing with a mouse admittedly inserted a sense of remove, but the computer was no less engaging than paint or pencils, in its way. She especially enjoyed drawing wonky fluffs of popcorn, the judder of the line imparting a sense of explosion. Though she did miss color, the black-and-white format enabled her to concentrate on the expressiveness of the figures—the slim, attenuated grace of Aaron, the wide-eyed, despondent close-up of Spencer’s stricken face when he believes that in a single day he’s been replaced. Because to accurately reflect the nature of an Etch A Sketch drawing the line could never lift, depicting isolated elements like eyes and shirt buttons was technically challenging. Once she was satisfied with a picture, she surrounded the illustration with the red frame of the toy, adding two white knobs on the bottom.

  The work was well under way when Lawrence came home one night in March looking alarmingly pale. He admitted that he’d felt “a little weird” all day, but had soldiered through to nightfall at Blue Sky. She knew something was terribly wrong when he couldn’t make a dent in their popcorn. Not long thereafter, he slipped off and closed the loo door, though the sound of violent retching escaped its cracks. The next day, a Saturday, Lawrence propped himself in front of his computer to work on a paper about the guerrilla war in Nepal. At regular intervals, he would scuttle to the loo, quietly brush his teeth, and return to the keyboard.

  Lawrence made an exasperating patient. For a solid fortnight, he dragged himself out of bed at seven a.m., dressed for work, and stared down a cup of coffee that clearly turned his stomach. Then it would be left to Irina to take the coffee away, fix a cup of weak tea and piece of un-buttered toast, and put him back to bed. Though he was dropping an alarming amount of weight, he perpetually urged her to return to her project, and apologized for the distraction of his “stupid little virus.” Yet when toward the end of his convalescence she too came down with a touch of something—just a mild sore throat and runny nose—Lawrence, still shaky and off-color, fetched pillows, hankies, and hot lemon drinks, even braving the ghastly Elephant & Castle for novels and lozenges. For Pete’s sake, he was the only man she’d ever met on whom she would have urged more self-pity.

  THE FACT THAT SHE finished her project on Ramsey’s birthday—his forty-ninth, she calculated—wasn’t altogether coincidental. Oh, she hadn’t proposed to Lawrence that they try to resume their old tradition; goodness, they hadn’t seen Ramsey since Bournemouth nearly two years before, and there comes a point where you put off getting in touch out of sheer embarrassment that for far too long you have put off getting in touch. Besides, last year Ramsey himself had let them off the hook. But because the sixth of July remained a powerful marker in her mind, it made a fitting private deadline, of whose significance Lawrence was agreeably unaware when she unveiled the illustrations that night.

  “It’s fucking brilliant!” Lawrence announced when he had finished leafing through her printouts. Alas, he could not resist adding, “I still think that ending is off. But you’re only going to listen to an editor, who will tell you the same thing.”

  Despite his reservations, Lawrence dedicated himself to seeing Ivan and the Terribles celebrated in the world of commerce with a determination that put her supportive trips to Tesco in the shade. He declared that it was high time she replaced her mousy, small-time agent with heavy-hitting representation, and did exhaustive Internet research on which in-fluential British agents had lucrative sales in the US. He “helped” her design—i.e., put together himself—a professional-looking submission package, including a CD of both the Ivan illustrations and digital photos of previous work, a polished CV, and confident cover letter. Her studio grew stacked with identical manila envelopes, all neatly addressed with printed labels and pasted with proper postage. She may have been a tad uneasy with his taking over so completely; at once, his efforts on her account moved her more than she could say.

  Meanwhile, six months had elapsed since Irina had ceased to stop by the clinic in Bermondsey to pick up new packets of pills, and yet her periods proceeded to make her feel heavy and churlish in perfect cycle with the moon. Thus that autumn she prevailed upon Lawrence to see his GP, and got a checkup herself. Irina’s blood-work confirmed that for a woman her age her hormone levels were splendid. But when his GP rang, her partner grunted through the call with a gruffness that even for Lawrence seemed impolite.

  “Well, that’s it, then,” he said when he hung up. “Low sperm count.” He sank onto the sofa. He didn’t turn on the television, though it was time for the news.

  Irina sat beside him, and tucked a lock behind his ear. “It’s really hopeless?”

  “Seems like!” he said. “You know, I’ve read that male potency in the West may be plummeting because of widespread use of oral contraception. You girls pop all these pills and then pee them away, and the estrogen gets into the water supply.”

  Irina smiled. “Are you saying that it’s my fault?”

  “Well, it’s nobody’s fault, is it?” he said ferociously.

  “This really bothers you, doesn’t it? Even though, on the kid business, I sensed you were on the fence.”

  Lawrence stood up. “Well, it’s probably better this way, isn’t it? You’re forty-four. Pregnancy would be hard on you, and at your age the chances of birth defects soar. Maybe if we’d gotten on this a long time ago… But Jesus, by the time the kid entered college, we’d be drawing social security. Besides, with me at Blue Sky weekdays, you’d do most of the work, and that wouldn’t be fair. Your career would suffer.”

  Though she sympathized with his sense of having been unmanned, Irina was struggling with her own disappointment, and sour-grapes wasn’t helping. “No, I know you. Between weekends and evenings, you’d find a way to pull your weight and then some. Look at the way you nurse me when I don’t feel well, or how you’re helping me with Ivan. You’re chronically responsible. You’d be up at four a.m., crooning and rocking and feeding the baby breast-expressed bottles from the refrigerator so I could get some sleep.”

  Lawrence shoved his hands in his pockets and looked to the floor. “Yeah, probably.” Glancing up, he seemed to remember her. “Did you have your heart set on this?”

  “Oh, we’d left it so late, I couldn’t afford to count on it. I’ve just had this feeling that something more needs to happen. We just keep going on and on and…” She shrugged.

  “Lots of other things can happen,” he said, though the promise sounded ominous. “Still, I’m sorry
.”

  “You know,” she said tentatively, “we might think about alternatives.”

  “Adoption?”

  “That’s more of a crapshoot than I’m ready for. I meant—maybe in vitro.”

  “If my jizz is firing blanks, it’s not going to hit a bull’s-eye in a petri dish, either.”

  “No, obviously it would have to be someone else’s.” She avoided the word sperm.

  “A bank?” Lawrence wouldn’t use the word himself. “That’s still half crapshoot. Who’s to say the donor’s not a serial killer?”

  “I was more thinking that maybe we could ask—someone we know.”

  “Like who?”

  Irina looked away. “No one comes to mind, off the top of my head…”

  Lawrence thrust his face into her line of vision. “Someone we know, and you wouldn’t need in vitro, would you?”

  “Lawrence! I wouldn’t do that.”

  “However some other guy’s spunk gets up there, are you seriously proposing that I constantly bump into someone we know and he knows and I know that he’s the real father of my kid? Use your head! How would you feel if you had to raise a son or daughter that was, I don’t know, mine and Betsy’s?”

  She smiled. “Could do worse.”

  “Forget it. Forget the whole fucked-up thing. If it’s not clean, I’m not interested.” If it’s not mine, I’m not interested—a running theme.

  Irina did forget it. Lawrence had violent convictions about what a man did and did not do. Of course, borrowing a cup of sugar from next door would never have worked, emotionally at least. But for once Irina despaired of her partner’s rigidity, his strict notions of manliness, which now constrained her life as well. Because physically? Maybe a woman knows these things. Maybe a woman can tell. She had a gut instinct that the first donor prospect who popped into her head would have been a perfect match. It would have worked. In vitro or otherwise, it would have worked—the very first try.

  SO THEY SOUGHT THE standard compensation for a childless career woman, and lo, in short order three prestigious agents were eager to take Irina on. The basis on which she selected the winning representative surprised her; it was out of character.

  Irina had been frugal her whole life. Her mother was obsessed with money, and as a girl she’d colored her crayons to nubs. Granted that Lawrence now made a decent wage, but she had never believed that his money was her money quite, and she felt self-conscious that with her stingy illustration advances she couldn’t completely cover her half of the rent. Shopping in thrift stores, buying their furniture at Oxfam, was one way of contributing to the family coffers.

  Yet there was a meanness to this outlook, a reluctance to spend the currency of life itself. Unrelenting penny-pinching precluded bursts of you-only-live-once abandon, as well as the fuck-it thrill particular to costly purchases that are foolhardy. It sobered Irina to realize the degree to which she allowed parsimony to control her decisions, on both the large scale and the small. When she had offered to pay her own way to Russia, had she really been serious, or did she make the gesture only knowing full well that Lawrence didn’t want her along? For that matter, they were a hop, skip, and a jump from the Continent, yet she never urged Lawrence to take holidays in Rome or Venice, because it was too expensive. When was the last time she’d bought herself a new dress? Not a new old dress, a new new dress? She couldn’t remember. They now had this Ford Capri, but she still did most of the shopping on foot, to save on petrol. At Tesco, she’d always get the yellow-tag snow peas, despite having a yen for French green beans—which were too expensive. If bargain-hunting afforded a scheming little pleasure, were there not also pleasures in extravagance—in obliviously blowing £200 on a single night out?

  The first agent was nice. The second agent seemed in uncanny accord with her artistic sensibility. The third agent promised that Ivan would sell for pots of money.

  Bingo.

  Pitching simultaneously to Britain and the States, Irina’s new agent put the book up for auction, and between the two markets Irina’s Etch A Sketch project brought in $125,000. Irina took Lawrence out to dinner at Club Gascon, and though they didn’t quite manage to squander £200 on five courses with matching wines, they came damned close.

  Thus they were in festive form for Christmas in Brighton Beach again. This time there were no fights about the heating or napkins or soap dishes, much less any drunken displays of abandon that knocked over the samovar, and when familial gatherings proceed with unerring smoothness and conviviality, they can also seem profoundly pointless. On the plane home, Irina fantasized about what kind of climactic quarrel she could pick with her mother that might issue in a merciful era of not-speaking. Some concocted impasse would save so much bother, including those newsy international phone calls placed with dutiful regularity every month. Still, the visit had its gratifying side. Tatyana had fallen all over herself hugging and squeezing and declaring for no reason at all that she “simply adored her big sister,” of whom she was “incredibly proud,” which meant that inside she was seethingly jealous.

  Ivan and the Terribles was published in September of 2000 to great fanfare on both sides of the Atlantic. Its publicity budget was generous, and if the reviews were less so, large adverts in the New York and London Times more than made up for critical nitpicking. The print run was enormous, the cover price widely discounted, and Irina’s survey of Waterstone’s and WHSmith confirmed that stacks had made it into the chains. Decry “selling out” as you may, there was a variety of selling out—of copies—whose stigma Irina would gladly assume. No one was going to tell her that those piles of red-framed glossy hardbacks on Waterstone’s front tables weren’t beautiful.

  18

  IRINA TOLD HERSELF SHE could use the constitutional, but her heels down Grove Road rang with the same self-deceit of afternoon clips into the bedroom on the pretext of stowing a pair of socks, when her real intention was to masturbate. If she was walking all the way down to Borough, chances were high that she would indulge her secret vice.

  The morning’s mild late-April weather was overcast, yet she felt oddly dogged by a shadow, a darkness at her back. She’d allowed plenty of time for this adventure—the tube ride home, then a late-afternoon train to Sheffield from King’s Cross. As for the vice, though it was Saturday she’d assurance by e-mail that Lawrence was safely at a conference in Dubai. So the drag on her spirits must be the impending World final tomorrow. Ramsey had once more gotten his hopes up, and if he went down in this one, that would make eight championship finals that he’d reached and lost. He’d turned fifty last summer, and if he didn’t prevail in the 2001 he might never get a chance at that title again.

  More honestly, the dread may have been of going to another snooker tournament, period—smiling idiotically beside Ramsey as the supportive little wife. It would be one thing were Ramsey ever obliged to play the supportive little husband. But aside from her sparsely populated book launch at Foyle’s last September—for which, Snake’s Head being strapped, Ramsey had bought the wine—he’d had little experience of what it felt like to be invisible.

  Her attendance at tournaments was now a constant bone of contention. That first season during which he’d kept her tucked in tow Ramsey had taken more titles than in the ten years previous, culminating in making his seventh final at the Crucible. Yet the following two tours, with her company at best sporadic, his ranking had nosedived. His reduced status at Match-Makers translated into the loss of perks like limo service, and while he may not have cared much about limos in and of themselves, he did care about what they meant. Worse, dropping from the Top 16 required this giant among men to play qualifiers to gain entry to tournaments whose trophies had decorated his basement snooker hall, which was, he said, like having to ring the doorbell of your own house.

  So Ramsey had concluded that Irina’s presence made all the difference, and pressured her at every turn to come along. She’d insisted that she was a woman with her own career and not his lucky rab
bit’s-foot. She didn’t ever want to get bored with snooker (that was the politic formulation), and that meant only going to see him play when she felt like it (okay, basically never). Oh, his expectation that she attend the final tomorrow was more than reasonable, and it had been ungenerous of her to watch yesterday’s semi at home on TV—and “watch” only loosely speaking, since the match was really just on in the background while she e-mailed Lawrence about Dubai.

  Crossing London Bridge to Borough High Street was bittersweet, passing Borough Market a sharp reminder of how little she cooked these days. But then, maybe all those pies had been a waste of time. She couldn’t say.

  The instant that she slid her old key in the lock and slipped into the flat, something felt changed. The air smelt more fragrant. A saucy black beret decked the coat rack.

  The living room at first glance seemed unaltered, until her eye lit indignantly on a muddy-brown Lissitzky, which had replaced the Miró. Lawrence, buy new art prints? On the table lay the Independent, a paper that he ridiculed as shrill. Where, pray tell, was the Telegraph?

  Padding uneasily down the hall, Irina poked her head into her former studio, long ago converted to Lawrence’s study. Now, in the space where her drawing table once sat, was a second desk, and not of the Oxfam ilk that Irina favored but brand-new. Further reconnaissance turned up a clatter of makeup on her dresser—gaudy lipsticks that Irina herself eschewed—and in the loo, mango-blueberry shampoo.

  Lawrence used Head & Shoulders.

  It was in the kitchen that Irina began to frown. To her consternation, her long rows of spice jars had been reduced to a few crude standards like premixed Italian seasoning and dehydrated parsley. Some twenty popcorn seasonings, several like Old Bay and Stubb’s Barbeque Spice Rub toted from New York, had vanished wholesale. The larder had also been culled, her dark sesame paste, rose water, and pomegranate molasses replaced with soup mixes, instant gravy granules, and bottled Bolognaise. The seal was broken on Irina’s massive rainy-day jar of Spanish anchovies in olive oil; she shouldn’t betray her presence here, but the amount of self-control it took to keep from putting that big beautiful jar sternly in the refrigerator was stupendous.